Thursday, November 16, 2006

Dictionary Week

Blog
N: an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page; also called Weblog, Web log


This pretty much sums up most of my week. Researching the Internet for different terms and writing them out in my own words. I can't say it was hard, research is quite an easy task, but time consuming and frustrating are two words that I would definitely 'look up'. This was in aid of the Back to BASIC assignment that we are doing (where we have to create a website about computer terms and definitions). I've still not finished the task, but I still think that I'm on target with the assignment, which is a big weight off my mind.

The second lot of dictionary related lectures came on Thursday morning. Where we were given a lecture on different industry standard image compression formats. One of which was 'Dictionary Encoding'. At this point I'd just about had enough of dictionaries (no matter in what context they were) and could just tell it was to be a bad day.

Whilst the days are getting shorter, the days of college are getting longer, as on Wednesday we stayed right up until 6 o'clock. Although we were warned about this, I didn't realise just how much an extra hour of work could take out of you. I was exhausted. So much in fact that on Wednesday night I couldn't even face reading through my lecture notes for the day, and instead decided to leave them until the weekend where I could look at the weeks notes as a whole.

Wednesday also brought with it, talk about my blog from Dean. Who said that my blog does not contain enough pictures. This is something I will bear in mind for future blogs, and will not only try and spend the week finding images for my sketch book, but also perhaps for images to be placed on my blog as well.

Thursday brought yet more fun and excitement with it. Using Photoshop in college for the first time. I finally got my serial numbers through for my version of CS2 and Studio 8 but as of yet, have had no chance to install them. So using CS2 for the first time was to be the highlight of my week. Or so I thought. The task in the assignment was much like the computing terms task, in the way that it was time consuming and frustrating. I could even go as far as saying it was boring (although this is an opinion that will probably change after looking back on the assignment). Hopefully the assignment will improve once I start writing about the images, and getting back into the reason I joined the course, and not spending my time creating graphs and charts in Microsoft Excel.

Next week ought to be a good week, as I may get chance to start designing my screens for the Back to BASIC assignment, something of which I really enjoyed in the last assignment. Also next week, I will hopefully complete the image compression task, which means that we can then use Photoshop to complete the restoration task of the assignment - something that I have been looking forward to since before the start of the course.

I've still to get around to creating my own version of an inspirational art piece, although I have had some idea's of how to do them, and how to make it my own. Hopefully I'll get chance to do it sooner rather than later.

5 comments:

J.Milsom said...

You're posts are way to interesting, a real hazzard when you're trying to do work. Good or Bad thing? I do not know

Dean said...

I think you misunderstood me Craig. I didn't say you don't have enough pictures on your blog.

I said that your blogs in particular are very interesting to read and maybe a picture would not only break up the text but give a visual explanation to your already excellent entries.

I can honestly say I look forward to reading your weekly blogs above all the others.

Craig Allington said...

Cheers Jamie, and Dean.

And sorry for misunderstanding you Dean, I get what you mean now, though I think that finding pictures for my blog weekly may be something good seen as I seem to have relatively long blogs (Journalism Wannabe for you eh?). It's good to hear you look forward to reading my blogs, I can too honestly say I look forward to reading yours (and Drew's) especially too because of you only doing the HNC your blogs seem (somehow) to be a bit different to everyone elses. I think because you may feel you can go into more detail than most others in the class do, but I don't know.

Julian Dyer said...

I think that long blogs are fine, Craig, as long as they don’t dwell on the same subject for ages. I think your blog has the right balance of humour, relevance and outside projects which combine to make it very readable.

I also think that posting a few select pictures can add a lot to the blog, but if there is a week where none naturally fit in with the post, then it is ok to go without.

Craig Burgess said...

I couldn't help being drawn to one throw-away term in your blog - that "boring" word again.

While these kind of tasks are repetitive, it's really the only way something can become second nature. Repeating a task over and over will become second nature eventually, and trust me when I say this: the save to web feature will become one of the most used features there.

I've stopped thinking of things as boring anymore, as everything always has a higher purpose.